Climate-resilient management of Dutch sandy landscapes as a multi-objective optimization problem 

In the Netherlands, sandy soil landscapes are vital for food production, drinking water supply, biodiversity maintenance, and human habitation. However, they face increasing risks due to frequent droughts and unsustainable agricultural land management practices that deplete both water and soil resources. Projected climatic extremes and higher demographic and food production trends further intensify these challenges. The necessity for a more climate-resilient management of these landscapes has been emphasized in Dutch government directives, such as the Deltaprogramma. To achieve such management pathways, it is essential to identify states and synergies that facilitate multifunctional use of these landscapes while maintaining or transforming their desirable attributes. While quantitative approaches exist to assess the ecological or economic resilience of landscapes, they currently fall short in sufficiently addressing both anthropogenic influences and hydrological and pedological responses within the landscape system. Our study aims to address this gap, by developing a modeling framework that dynamically couples existing regional biophysical and bioeconomic models, such as hydrological meta-SWAP and VFLOW models, with sorting algorithms, namely NSGA-II, to realize the resilient states and trade-offs in system functioning resulting from different land use strategies within the landscape during future climate change scenarios. The results yielded from this modeling framework can be presented as a Pareto-optimal front of functionalities, and it can be used to assess the subjective resilience of each function for each actor that is involved in the system, further facilitating new policy pathways in the region.